Travel Leaders Corporate has launched an updated version of its portal for travel managers and travelers that offers new integrations, simplified search capabilities and sustainability data access.
The travel solutions company's portal, Home, has been a customizable portal for customers with widgets for such tasks as online booking and expense management. Home Plus, the new version that was launched this week during the Global Business Travel Association convention, offers a single source for trip approvals, health and safety information, passport and visa notification, traveler tracking, unused ticket management and profile management with integrated online booking, according to Travel Leaders.
"You don't have to go elsewhere," Travel Leaders Corporate president Mike Boult said. "The profile is read, updated with safety and visa information, and all travel is captured and monitored, so they can receive alerts on delays, cancellations and disruptions."
The tool also features a natural language search function to retrieve and analyze program data. For example, a user can type, "How many Hilton hotels are my travelers staying at?" or "How many of my travelers are flying on American today?" to retrieve the respective results, Boult said.
Additionally, Home Plus features carbon emission tracking capabilities by traveler, time period and organization. Thrust Carbon helps provide the data for the program, Boult said.
As the tool launched, Travel Leaders noted it is seeing significant growth in its meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions business, with current demand up 15 percent compared with the first quarter of this year. The company expects events will return to full attendance in 2023, with additional growth of 35 percent over 2022 levels.
During the pandemic, Travel Leaders Corporate employed a strategy of working with travel suppliers and other entities in need of talent and offering its own employees for temporary help to fill their customer service needs. For example, some Travel Leaders advisors worked with the state of New York in scheduling Covid-19 testing and others to help two large suppliers in their contact centers. As travel volumes have recovered, that strategy has given the company an advantage, Boult said.
"We could recover fast and recall everybody, and we didn't have to go out and chase people," Boult said. "Where everyone else is really struggling for talent, we haven't struggled for talent."